An Intra-Node Implementation of OpenSHMEM Using Virtual Address Space Mapping

The recent OpenSHMEM effort has generated renewed in-terest in developing a portable, high-performance implemen-tation of the SHMEM programming interface. One advan-tage of SHMEM is the simplified one-sided communication model, but the traditional UNIX shared memory model does not support the single-copy semantics offered by SHMEM for exchanging data between processes on the same proces-sor or within the same memory coherency domain. In this paper, we describe an initial implementation of the OpenSH-MEM programming interface that uses operating system vir-tual address space mapping capabilities to provide efficient intra-node operations. We describe the details of the imple-mentation for two different operating systems, Linux and the Kitten lightweight kernel, and we use micro-benchmarks to compare the performance of our implementation to the SHMEM implementation available on a Cray XE6 platform. 1